Sorry, you can't install this bit torrent client or this crypto wallet...
If you don't want your photos scanned, turn off iCloud. You can disagree about whether or not that's anti-consumer, but you cannot argue they are changing anything about your device or it's EULA (they are changing the EULA of a service).
It's a feature of Communication safety in Messages. This is opt-in.
The child protection part can be enabled for under 13s if they’re in a family account. If enabled messages app will try and detect adult images being sent and received and give a warning to the child, it can also let the parents know about it.
I don't know the details here, but you can disable iMessage and just send plain SMS, which in theory does not send the data to Apple. But then, part of the point of using iMessage is that the message contents are not sent to your carrier and have some encryption in place. I would guess your best bet is to find another phone manufacturer and use a different messaging service that provides better security if you want to opt out.
> It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a feature of the Messages app, not the iMessage service. For one thing, this means it applies to images sent or received via SMS, not just iMessage. But more importantly, it changes nothing about the end-to-end encryption inherent to the iMessage protocol. The image processing to detect sexually explicit images happens before (for sending) or after (for receiving) the endpoints. It seems like a good feature with few downsides. (The EFF disagrees.)
https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...
Next will come scanning of your phone's content. "Hey, if you never send email or chat, the scanner never runs."
And keyboard logging. "For the children".
Encrypt end-to-end all you want, it doesn't matter if your device is running spyware.
We are in agreement.
I had quite a hard time explaining to some people why the anger towards this wasn’t pro-pedo essentially because they couldn’t understand why anyone would be against these people being found.
The next step in that debate is "yeah but the big monopolies are making it impossible for a little guy to get in." Which is true.
We can agree the regulatory capture is bad.
In the meanwhile, Google is not openly saying they will run ML on your images on your phone. With Android, you don't have to sync to the cloud, and you could even replace or add your own camera option. You can side-load without jailbreaking, etc.
Now, not that most consumer friendly option, but the advice for this crowd is still good - if you still have an iPhone and this is the last straw for you, there are plenty of good options that still exist, today. And then - let's fight regulatory capture and big government so a more dynamic marketplace can take root.
The point is that we're REALLY playing with fire here.
It's not. That's the problem.
The assumption that a "functioning" market will do a good job of catering to even fairly popular wishes does not seem to hold true in the real world, including for cases in which I'm pretty damn sure it's not some kind of government interference causing it not to. It's utterly common for plain ol' commodities subject to no special government scrutiny or control and with many suppliers to provide no option for features or product-types that would surely have many buyers, simply because no-one expects the returns to be as high as doing something else with the same capacity.
AFAIK this happens for a bunch of reasons, including that information is very, very far from being perfectly shared in all parts of the market, that there are significant costs associated with quality information-gathering, and efficient use of capital tending to cause production to cluster around tiny little bits of the possible product space (similar to how pharmacies like to build right next to each other, rather than spreading out to reduce travel-time-to-a-pharmacy in an area)
Subaru lets you do it over your Wifi, but does not seem like they come with a modem:
https://techinfo.subaru.com/stis/doc/ownerManual/Gen4_FOTA_H...
Although, Mazda’s website does say this, so maybe it will not be for long before they all come connected to mobile networks:
https://newsroom.mazda.com/en/publicity/release/2021/202106/...
> Mazda intends to fortify our initiatives of development of fundamental software technology in order to be able to accommodate for next-generation Mobility as a Service (Maas) and update vehicle functions Over the Air (OTA)
> Five Japanese OEM companies 3 including Mazda will jointly develop standard engineering specifications of next-generation in-vehicle communication devices to push for a standardized communication system in order to provide safer and stress-free connected services sooner.
The only option is to abandon ship.
Nothing anywhere says that Apple scans the pictures you store on your own device. They only scan the pictures you upload to their cloud service.
The scanning is done on device before upload in Apple’s case, and in the cloud after upload in Google’s case, but either way it is only done to photos that are uploaded to their cloud services.
If you are really claiming Apple scans the photos you don’t upload to iCloud Photo Library, then you are lying or dissembling.
I assume that is not what actually what you mean.
Now you appear to be making a false statement about your own words.
You only mentioned photos you store in your own device, and you said nothing about uploading to servers.
Here’s what you said:
> Nothing in those links says that Google can scan the pictures you store in your device using your own device to do the scanning.
BUT THE CAPABILITY TO SCAN CONTENT OF PHOTOS ON DEVICE EXISTS. The argument is tomorrow they can simply start sending scan meta data or captions of image content up to a server without you opting into cloud storage.
The capability exists on device. It's all baby steps.
As to the capability on the device, the capacity to scan for CSAM is very narrow and is very hard to repurpose.
The capacity to upload images to iCloud Photo Library on the other hand has been there for years.
At any time Apple could add some other kind of scanner if they want to, and there is no reason for it to use this mechanism. It would be terrible if they did but it has nothing to do with this.
Anyone with programming experience can tell you that if all they wanted to do was check arbitrary files against a list of hashes, they would be a simple mechanism to write.
There is no way that this mechanism helps them scan for other things. It isn’t even a step in that direction, let alone a baby step.
I'm not an expert in how CSAM works, but if it only as a block list against certain images it will be very ineffective.
The way I would expect it to work, is to recognize the content of images. The SOTA on this is pretty impressive. Knowing the content of the images is what Google does in the cloud, and its great. I can search my images for "Green taxi" and it will find it. Water. Sunsets. Anything.
If apple is introducing the ability to recognize photo content on the device (even if right now it is destined for the cloud as a pre-scan), it doesn't really matter that the model is only tuned to find child abuse, as an example.
Tomorrow, the hyper-parameters or the ontology could be expanded to search for anything. Political affiliations, location and timestamps (this doesn't even need modeling!), illegal objects or substances, etc.
The deal is that Apple is saying "we are going to use your device to determine what is in your pictures." The circumstances and scope of those determinations can change, but the expectation that Apple will be doing it is now publicly established.
You don’t have to be. It’s easy to find docs on this exact technology with Google.
> but if it only as a block list against certain images it will be very ineffective.
It is not.
> The way I would expect it to work,
You are basically completely wrong. Read up on it and then we can discuss it.
The FBI/CIA/CCP are not the people we elect.
My representative is behind the charge to undo the app store monopoly. We can also push for less surveillance, less centralization of power, etc.
It seems if the OS vendor doesn't get to have a default browser, default app store, and default cloud store, that they don't get access to scan your files without asking either.
Legislate.
You don't want Google? No problem, blow the ROM away and install Lineage without GApps, you can even mess with MicroG if you're reliant on some app that needs Play Services.
I want an option that is "grandma" compatible. In other words, it isn't really viable if you can't just buy it off the shelf, or have to dig into settings to opt out. Right now if I go to Best Buy (or insert your favorite retailer here), I can't buy hardware off the shelf that won't send my data to a remote server by default.
A UI, sure, I could understand that, but a kernel?
I'm not too keen on contributing to linux monoculturization of IT anyway.
Corporations and governments combine to basically make privacy a niche thing for tinkerers only, you simply cannot mass-market the development attitudes nor technical and opsec skills needed to achieve a real degree of privacy on the user side.
The solution to this problem does not lie in a technical plane, nor does it in digital escapism.
Grandma does just fine on Android and would be utterly confused by iOS.
It's all about what you're used to.
Shitty UI design is irrelevant of OS.